williammc wrote:On many occasions, I get this message from USB remove:

Could not find any processes locking usb device. The USB device maybe
is locked by a process running under another account with more
privileges than yours.

This occurs on two different computers when trying to remove a WD passport 80GB drive. I'm admin on both computers and I'm pretty sure there are no other accounts.

Do you know what might be causing it? I suspect synctoy, but as it is an inconsistent problem, I'm not sure.

Hi, williammc! Thank you for the question.
What do you do before unsuccessful disconnection?

You've mentioned that "on many occasions" you cannot disconnect your drive. Does it mean that sometimes you can disconnect it? If yes, maybe you can describe any differences in your activity with hard-drive when you have and when you don't have these problems?

I wish I could find out what happens to "lock" the usb drive. It seems completely random. I said that I suspect synctoy, but sometimes it isn't locked by synctoy. I have been unable to find any consistent actions that cause it.

Basically I was wondering what makes safely remove bring up that message? If I knew, I might be able to do some digging around with process explorer and see what I can find.

williammc wrote:I wish I could find out what happens to "lock" the usb drive. It seems completely random. I said that I suspect synctoy, but sometimes it isn't locked by synctoy. I have been unable to find any consistent actions that cause it.

Basically I was wondering what makes safely remove bring up that message? If I knew, I might be able to do some digging around with process explorer and see what I can find.

williammc, my apologizes for the long response. Yes, sometimes Windows doesn't allow to disconnect a drive. USR in many cases can disconnect drives which is not possible to disconnect with the native tool, but sometimes it is also helpless. In future versions we will implement a direct mechanism that allows to stop drives without using standard Windows' functions.

What causes Windows to not disconnect devices?
1. When you are copying many files for a short period of time. It seems like Windows has left some internal connections to the device and doesn't allow USB Safely Remove to stop the device. In this case only you can do is to restart the computer, or go to the Device Manager, find your device and try to disable\enable it.
2. Some programs or services can secretly lock the device. Here the list of this programs:

Service Program for Intel(R) Desktop Utilities (IDUServ.exe)

Diskeeper (I do not now the name of the process)

And some antiviruses for unknown reason (perhaps it's a bug in Windows) left connections to USB device. I've heard that F-Prot can prevent device from being stopped.

You can try to stop a program (or service) before device disconnection in order to see if you device is disconnected.

Conclusion. You can try to find the reason or... wait for the new program versions, where we will implement direct force disconnection.[/list]